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TINA vs Demos

For those (like this blog) who think Austerity® — when on those rare occasions when it isn’t a myth — is math, the outcome of this is already written vividly on the wall. By the autumn the new government will have been denounced as traitors by the left, and have become a teaching aid for the right.

Greece needs to recognize that it will effectively be a financial pariah, unable to access Western money markets. It will have almost no hard currency, and no ability to buy goods which require hard currency. [… ] This is a huge problem for Greece because it has neither oil nor the ability to feed itself. Syriza MUST have a plan to deal with both these problems. Neither is insurmountable.

“… Last but not least, while Mr. Kammenos and his sovereigntyist right-wing ANEL party [Independent Greeks] are certainly a lesser evil compared to formations like To Potami (whose stated goal was to force Syriza to stay within the narrow boundaries set by the EU and the Memorandums), they are nonetheless an evil. Their participation in the government, even with just one minister, would symbolise the end of the idea of an ‘anti-austerity government of the Left’. Moreover, this is a party of the Right, one that is particularly concerned to protect the ‘hard core’ of the state apparatus (it will be important to keep a watchful eye over whatever cabinet portfolio it might get). It will be no surprise if its first demands are for the ministry of defence or public order, though it seems that it will not get them.”http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1829-stathis-kouvelakis-after-syriza-s-victory

Syriza are already seen as traitors on the left. Their pragmatic affair with right wing populists (ANEL) will make the left heartbreak even harder. Syriza might threaten with (or even make) tactical alliances with Russia and China next (Das Wirtschaft is a more precarious position that it may seem, Germany doesn’t have oil either, neither does it have enough material or materiel), which would at least make things more interesting and deadly. But most probably, Syriza is at most a footnote in some hypothetical “Decline and final fall of social democracy” hopelessly academic paper published in 2020.

But let’s say that Syriza is indeed radical left that it is capable of terror … and that Chulthu is a soft toy. Is that like saying that China is a communist country or that USA is one ? Or will shale oil bubble pop or crashing of world economy by deep learning trading bots make all this irrelevant ? This may seem confused, but Syriza is even more so.

the structure of the left is such that any mainstream leftism is always a traitor to ‘the left’ taken in abstract, contaminated as it is by dint of its actualisation in reality and outside the minds of adolescent idealists. partly this is because the left sets itself up as speaking truth to power, and when it is forced to play as power rather than as truth (= as journalism) the game gets muddled and the loose coalitions of the disaffected get embroiled in internal strife, schisms, and prolier-than-thou wars. the left disintegrates when holding overt political power because its extreme fringes always have to claim to have no power – i.e. they must oppose the doctrines of their milder brethren. but this disintegration probably just serves to shift the overton window left, as it opens an osmotic channel between truth and power whereby less extreme (and therefore more visibly empowered) elements in the left are siphoned off into what is perceived as the right. the purest form of ‘no true scotsman’ is ‘no true marxist’.